The World According to Fannie Davis Read online

  603

  825

  047

  269

  481

  Or you could add a 3 to each number, and get this rundown:

  603

  936

  269

  592

  825

  Even though Numbers was seemingly a game of chance, with no amount of prediction or skill mitigating its high odds, it’s easy to understand how players tried to remove the guesswork from picking a number. After all, many decisions went into each day’s play: What combination of three digits to play? Play those numbers straight or box them (so that you’d win any combination that came out)? Which “race” to play, either Detroit or Pontiac or both? Which dream book to use? How much to put on any given number as opposed to another? How long to stay on a number before jumping off and playing a different number? Multiply that by the more than 300 days (minus Sundays and holidays) that a given three-digit number could “fall” or come out in a given year, and it makes sense that folks wanted to take the randomness out of it. Hence the dreams and hunches and prophets and magical aids and rundowns, all designed to thwart those 1,000-to-1 odds.

  This explains the close relationship between spirituality and the Numbers. My cousin Jewell firmly believes a hunch on a number is “Spirit talking to you.” Similarly, the Numbers are seen by many, particularly self-proclaimed mystics, as directly connected to numerology. Numerology is said to be based not on chance but rather on the belief that numbers are clues to the real, underlying structure of the universe, and that the number of a thing contains the essence of its being. Prof. Zonite, in Three Wise Men, devoted an entire page to numerology, describing it as an age-old science in “the study of the law of vibrations.” He noted that “One has but to consider his daily life for a moment to realize that either consciously or unconsciously he is ruled by numbers.” His dream book also offered “popular numerology vibrations,” which included two lists of numbers: the sixteen best boxed and the sixteen best straight.

  I was fascinated by this so-called science, and would often sneak and read (it felt like I should sneak) my sister Deborah’s paperback copy of the 1960s Complete Illustrated Book of the Psychic Sciences, purchased by her for $1.25, and which I still have on my shelf. In addition to everything from astrology to domino divination to moleosophy (the study of moles and their meaning) to palmistry, the book includes an expansive section on numerology. Given that every letter of the alphabet also stands for a number that carries its own vibration, a person’s full name equaled a “vibratory” number, which was an expression of that person’s “developed personality” and a key to her ambition or achievement. I recall Deborah lying across her bed, working out the details of her own personal number, and of our mother’s: F-A-N-N-I-E D-A-V-I-S, which equals the number 5. According to Psychic Sciences, “As a name number, 5 shows independence of thought as well as action…their names literally vibrate the spirit of adventure; without it, they feel lost. If they can apply that dash to their daily work, so that their jobs and surroundings are dramatic, with promise of the unexpected, they may gain real results.”

  Equally important was a person’s birth number, which represented the vibratory influence existing at the time of birth. My mother’s birth date, May 9, 1928, equals the lucky number 7. The number 7 is highly powerful in magic and religion, called a “complete” number, in part because seven of a thing often makes a complete set: seven planets of antiquity; seven days of the week; seven notes of the musical scale; seven deadly sins and seven virtues; seven colors of the spectrum. (No surprise, 777 also became a popular fancy to play.)

  “As a birth number, 7 denotes a scholarly, poetic nature, often inclined toward the fanciful, though persons with this birth vibration are analytical as well,” explains Psychic Sciences. “Intuition is a strong part of their nature and many such persons are highly imaginative.”

  As a child, I didn’t know about Mama’s lucky birth number, nor did I understand the connections among metaphysics and religion and luck and numerology and mysticism and dream interpretation. I just saw my mother’s life in the Numbers as magical, which included my genuine respect for the tools of her craft. I was fascinated by the red and green and blue spiral notebooks, yellow legal pads, multicolored pens, adding machines, staplers, ink pads with PAID stamps, white scratch pads, binders, lined loose-leaf paper, and the wondrous old-style, rectangular ticket books complete with receipt numbers and carbon paper. I also loved all of her reference materials, as I was drawn to the pink and blue and gold tip sheets, those softback dream books with crude artwork covers, the payout schedules, the “year in review” listings of fallen numbers. These materials were to me almost like children’s playthings, yet clearly grown-up—the paraphernalia of a Wise Woman at work.

  One day, I decided to organize Mama’s number-running materials, and went through the house gathering everything together into one shallow cardboard box. I was enamored of my own organizational skills and decided to add one final touch: on the side of the box, using bright pink nail polish, I carefully painted in boxy letters MAMA’S NUMBERS.

  I proudly showed this to my mother, impressed with myself for remembering the possessive apostrophe. She took one look and said, “You can’t put my business out in the street like that.”

  Looking back, this was the moment when I became consciously aware that I must keep my admiration for my mother’s work a private experience; before, I’d known to keep her livelihood a secret but hadn’t yet formed an opinion of, felt any pride in, what Mama actually did for a living. Now I understood that my pride for her also had to be kept secret, as did all the evidence of her work.

  Chastened, I took my black Magic Marker and scratched out what I’d painted onto the box; and after that episode, I began shoving things into drawers away from visitors’ view. Yet, to my delight, Mama continued to keep all her paraphernalia in that box, which ended up permanently perched atop a Louis XV–style chair in her bedroom. If I looked closely, I could still see the pink letters I’d painted beneath the blackout marker, and whenever I passed by, I’d chant to myself incantation-style: Ma-ma’s Num-bers, Ma-ma’s Num-bers, Ma-ma’s Num-bers…

  Six

  For my tenth birthday, Mama threw an elaborate party, inviting my entire fourth-grade class. A white magician performed magic tricks that actually included a live rabbit, and then made animals out of balloons as we children gathered round. Party guests spread out across the wide expanse of our big blue living room, the Jackson 5’s “ABC” blasting while we danced the funky chicken. I wore a deep pink pleated dress that fanned out when I twirled, making me feel like a princess. My classmates sang “Happy Birthday” before I blew out the candles on a dazzling tiered cake designed as a replica of my face. This birthday was a highlight of my young life, marking a shift for me. After months of uncertainty, Mama’s prediction had come true: we were happy in the new house.

  I had no idea that just twelve days before, on the same night I’d watched Michael and his brothers perform on Ed Sullivan’s show, the Feds had conducted a gigantic bust on the city’s Numbers racket. In simultaneous planned raids throughout the metropolitan area, three hundred FBI agents arrested fifty-eight people at thirty-six different number houses, twenty-nine of them run by blacks. More than half arrested were women.

  J. Edgar Hoover called it “the largest gambling raid in history” and boasted that the Mafia-controlled Numbers racket had been “eradicated” in the Motor City, effectively halting $300,000 a day in bets. Hoover bragged that the bust left the twelve thousand to fourteen thousand people who worked for Numbers operators, mostly as writers and runners, unemployed.

  The FBI had figured out that the telephone was now the key way bets were placed, unlike back when runners took customers’ bets in person using slips of paper; and so they had eavesdropped on calls, tapping sixteen telephones. This allowed the FBI, of course, to trace who calls were placed to. My mother now did nearly all her business over the telephone.

/>   Through those tapped conversations, agents also discovered that the numbers were rigged, to ensure that heavily played combinations didn’t fall; Detroit’s Italian Mafia reportedly made $18,000 a month supplying the winning numbers to the city’s operators—and another $10,000 a month for protection from big hits.

  James Ritchie, director of the federal Organized Crime Task Force, declared: “We have stopped every major numbers operation in the City of Detroit. We’ve got it stopped cold now.” Both the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press published the FBI’s list, naming every person arrested on “alleged numbers operations,” including his or her age and home address. All were charged with violating and conspiring to violate provisions of interstate racketeering laws (since winning digits for the “Pontiac number” were by then received by long-distance telephone, rather than a wire service) and were released on $1,000 personal bonds.

  John M. Carlisle, a Detroit News staff writer, wrote a feature story that ran the day after the bust, meant to explain the Numbers to laypeople. “Maybe there isn’t much sense or logic to the numbers game,” he opined. “Still it has been a great money-maker for the operators and a get-rich-quick dream for bettors with only loose change in their pockets.” His dramatic, one-sentence final paragraph reads: “The roof fell in last night.”

  Turns out, that high-profile bust didn’t stop the Numbers at all, and in fact operators, my mother included, were back in business within twenty-four hours. Still, Mama personally knew some of those who’d been arrested—“all on the operational or ownership level,” as the Feds described them—and it felt like too close a call. That was when she employed new security measures: She had a second, unlisted telephone line put in, on which she took numbers. She also began burning the previous month’s records in the incinerator, behind the furnace, in our basement. (A bonus feature that Broadstreet didn’t have.) She made sure only customers’ code names were used to identify them, and that the “key” to those names was kept at Broadstreet, in my sister Dianne’s possession (she and her husband had recently moved into the family home.) That way, if my mother ever got busted and police confiscated her betting slips and notebooks, no one else could be implicated by name. She protected her customers’ identities as she did her own.

  If my mother was on edge about being exposed, I didn’t see any signs of it in her demeanor. Is that why I did the unthinkable? One day, in front of Dianne and one of Mama’s oldest customers, Miss Bernice (who used to call me Four Eleven, my birth weight), my sister said, “I can’t believe it’s already the first of the month.”

  To which I replied, “Yeah, time for Mama to run her tapes.”

  Using her adding machine, Mama would create a monthly tally of the activity for each book (customers who themselves had people who bet with them)—including all payouts for hits, total money she’d collected and any “bonus” her customers had received. Customers got bonuses if by month’s end their particular book or “business” had no payouts, i.e., no hits. This windfall was up to 40 percent of that book’s total revenue, and offered as a gift, an incentive for customers to benefit from a given “good month” Mama was having with their particular group of bettors. Because her customers often got 10 percent tips from their own customers who hit a winning number, Fannie’s monthly bonus was also a generous way to offset that loss of extra money—and to keep bookies happily turning in their business to her.

  Mama didn’t let on to customers that she was in fact “holding” their numbers, that she and not someone else, someone bigger, was essentially the banker. They thought she was just collecting numbers, a ruse that was necessary for several reasons: first, to thwart those who might try to cheat her by not paying what they owed; if the money was going to a big Numbers man, customers were less likely to mess around with paying. Second, to thwart jealousy; if some of her clientele knew Mama was holding the business, they might stop turning in to her, this woman they viewed as getting “too big.” This is why, for instance, my mother eschewed Cadillac cars as too showy, and didn’t move to Southfield, a nearby suburb, or to a large house in one of the city’s tonier neighborhoods. Also, to thwart busts or break-ins. The subterfuge provided a layer of protection, always important for an illegal enterprise. The less people knew, the better. You’re more vulnerable if folks know you’re the one coming up with large sums of money for payouts. And police liked to bust the ones in charge. Only the house created these monthly tallies, so when I said Mama had to “run her tapes,” I was revealing way too much, putting her, and us, at risk.

  It grew deadly silent after I said that. I knew immediately that I’d messed up. Would Miss Bernice tell other customers the truth? Would word spread? Would this make Mama a target? Would she lose business?

  After Miss Bernice left (“You mind your mama, Four Eleven!”), Dianne made it clear she had to tell our mother what I’d done, even though I begged her Please, please don’t. She told me to expect a whipping, something I’d managed to avoid up to then. Reluctantly, I went to my room and awaited my fate. I was so scared I grabbed Rita’s Bible, which sat on our nightstand, and opened it to a random page. Why? For heavenly protection? Solace? I didn’t yet have a relationship with God in a profound way, but I was desperate in my foxhole. I waited in that room for what seemed like several torturous hours. At one point, my teeth started to chatter.

  Finally, Mama entered, closed the door. She didn’t have a belt, thank God. She sat on the twin bed opposite mine and said to me, her voice calm: “Why’d you do that?”

  I shrugged, eyes watery.

  “You know you can’t tell something like that ever again, don’t you?”

  I nodded as my tears fell. She looked at me.

  “Okay,” she said, finally. “I trust you.”

  Then she got up and left the room. I felt relieved, confused, grateful, and embarrassed all at once. I know this now: Not being punished for telling our secret that day has everything to do with why, growing up, I never felt ashamed of Mama’s vocation. She never shamed me. But you can best believe I never, ever ran my mouth again. Many years later, Mama said to me: “I know my children, and I knew that with you, the anticipation was punishment enough. I also knew you didn’t mean no harm. You really do know how to hold a secret in your belly. Always have.”

  Mama’s indulgences continued. One day I came home to find brand-new bedroom furniture, complete with a tall bookshelf, a handsome desk, and a matching chair. On the desk, Mama had placed a brand-new diary, and on the bookshelf she’d placed a book by Louise Meriwether entitled Daddy Was a Number Runner. Once I read the novel, about a black girl growing up amid Harlem’s numbers trade in the 1930s, I felt deeply comforted to know that a character in a book who looked like me had lived my experience.

  I decided then that I’d write stories one day. I already had a writing desk and a diary. In fact, I had a role model in my mother, who was working on her own story, one she wrote in longhand with green and black and blue ink in a black binder on unlined paper. She referred to it as “my book.” While I didn’t know exactly what she was writing, I knew that the binder existed, and that was permission enough.

  We had a housekeeper, Miss Katherine. She was a black woman who’d migrated from Mississippi, and Mama felt it important to help women like her by giving them work (despite the fact that my mother was convinced Miss Katherine didn’t clean our home as thoroughly as she cleaned white and Jewish women’s homes). I didn’t like how Miss Katherine chewed tobacco, and I once complained to her about it; Mama snapped at me, told me I was to respect all adults. “You are as good as anyone,” she said. “But you’re better than no one.”

  Inside the same old brass trunk where I found Rita’s letters to God, at the same time, I also found random receipts and invoices, two in particular that confirmed both Mama’s wealth and its fragility. One was a “retail installment contract and security agreement” between Mama and Crowley, Milner & Company for custom drapes and valances in “New Kashmir Kelly Green,” with m
atching sheer drapes in “Somoa.” The cost for the drapes including installation and tax is $1,295. But she was buying them on installment, and was charged an additional $193 for a “time price differential,” as well as 17.75 percent APR on the balance minus her $295 down payment. By the time she’d paid for the drapes, in twenty-four monthly payments of $50, they would have cost $1,700. I always saw my mother as “good with money” and not the type of person who’d enter into what looks like a classic furniture store rip-off. And yet, it makes sense that she was forever balancing her love of high-end purchases with her need to hold on to as much cash as possible. Pay-over-time arrangements made sense, given the nature of a gambler’s life.

  The other was an application for an “Investors Accumulation Plan” my mother filled out when I was seven. Fannie Drumwright as custodian for Bridgit Davis, under the Michigan Uniform Gift to Minors Act, it reads. She’d applied for a $15,000 plan, with an initial $200 and twelve years’ worth of $100 monthly payments to purchase shares of an “Investors Stock Fund, Inc.” that would mature by the time I was nineteen. Funny how dry documents can prompt deep emotion. I don’t know what became of Mama’s application, whether she joined the plan, made a few payments or many years’ worth; I don’t know what became of the stock, if in fact she ever acquired it. But the thought that she was trying to create a nest egg for my future, that she had that presence of mind and the smarts to do it, brings me near to tears. I suspect that either Mama was cheated out of her money, the stock fund accruing no value, or, far more likely, she needed the money at some point, to pay a big hit, and withdrew the funds. That too is the nature of a gambling life.

  Anyway, Mama found a totally different way to secure my future. When I was still ten, Rita fourteen, she gave us each a modest diamond ring she’d purchased at a pawnshop. “Now you don’t have to get excited just because a man gives you a ring,” she said to us both as we placed them on our fingers. “You can get excited over how he treats you.”